CAN WE SAVE 
CONSTITUTIONAL 
GOVERNMENT? 


A MEMORANDUM 

BY 

ALLEYNE IRELAND 

FHI.LOW <»F THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCF.MENT OF SCIENCE 
FELLOW OF THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY, ETC. 




THE OAK AND ANCHOR PUBLISHING CO. 

NEW YORK 




CAN WE SAVE 
CONSTITUTIONAL 
GOVERNMENT? 


A MEMORANDUM 

BY 

ALLEYNE IRELAND 

TBLLOW OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SClBNCli; 
FELLOW OF THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY, ETC. 


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THE OAK AND ANCHOR PUBLISHING CO. 

NEW YORK 






Copyright, 1922 
By ALLEYNE IRELAND 


All Rights Reserved 

Including that of Translation into 
the Scandinavian Languages 


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Printed in the United States of America 




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CAN WE SAVE 

CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT? 

I. 

Constitutional Government is menaced by a serious 
and world-wide dissatisfaction with the operation of 
existing political institutions. We are confronted not 
only by the various forms of protest adopted by those 
who wish to destroy existing institutions of Govern¬ 
ment, but also by a growing sense of helplessness and 
exasperation among those who wish to preserve 
them. There is scarcely a country in the world 
in which popular discontent with the inefficiency 
and with the extravagance of Government has not 
reached the danger point. 

The plain fact is that the Constitutionalists in 
every country have been issuing and constantly re¬ 
newing, for more than a hundred years, promissory 
notes for human betterment, and that the further 
renewal of these notes is becoming increasingly dif¬ 
ficult. 

During the past century there has occurred a con¬ 
tinuous and notable improvement in the general 
conditions of human life. In food, in housing, in 
clothing, in transportation, in surgery, in medicine, 
in methods of communication between man and man, 

[3] 


the health, convenience, comfort, and luxury of the 
people have been served with an ever-increasing 
measure of efficiency. It is of Government alone 
that it can be said that its practice is no closer to the 
circumstances in which it operates than would be the 
medical practice of a physician who should today 
prescribe the King’s Touch for scrofula. 

A contrast so impressive between the state of 
society and the state of politics cannot be due to a 
temporary or to an adventitious influence. Its origin 
is, indeed, clearly discernible. The immense progress 
which has been effected in the pure and in the applied 
sciences is attributable to a single cause, namely, that 
we have, through analytical investigation and the 
ruthless acceptance of proved facts, laid out a solid 
base of ascertained truth, upon which the structure 
of general scientific knowledge finds a secure founda¬ 
tion. 

Of the actual operation of Government the Consti¬ 
tutionalists have not made a study which can be 
described as scientific. They have made a formal 
examination of constitutions and of laws, that is to 
say of the therapeutics of Government, but this ex¬ 
amination has never been followed by that close and 
extended clinical observation upon which the prog¬ 
ress of the science of therapeutics is absolutely 
dependent. 

Two instances may be given in illustration of this 
point. We have passed many laws relating to usury. 
They are neither more nor less than prescriptions 
addressed to remedying the evils associated with the 
relationship between borrowers and lenders. If 
Government were scientifically studied we should 
have for our guidance a Report containing complete 

[4] 


statistics, over a number of years, of all the cases 
tried under these laws. From such statistics we 
could inform ourselves as to the real operation of 
the different laws, of the exact nature of each com¬ 
plaint made under them by debtors and by creditors, 
and of the disposition of the cases by the courts. 
There is no such Report. The consequence is that 
we know nothing whatever about the actual relations 
between debtors and creditors, or about the com¬ 
parative efficiency of the various remedies which 
legislatures have prescribed. 

Again: it has been asserted by a high official of 
the New York Police Department that there is less 
crime in New York than in any other great city in 
the world. In face of such an assertion the only 
course of action open to any one who dissents from 
it is to make a counter-assertion. No statistics are 
available upon which either of the protagonists can 
establish the truth of his statement. 

If Government were studied scientifically we 
should have at our disposal a Report showing, for 
twenty great cities over a period of years, the num¬ 
ber and the nature of crimes reported to the police, 
the number of arrests made, the number of convic¬ 
tions secured, the nature of the sentences imposed, 
the number of sentences carried out in whole or in 
part, the number of executive pardons, and the cost 
of the whole police system to the taxpayer. 

No such Report exists. In consequence we do not 
know whether New York has more or less crime 
than other great cities, whether the New York police 
force is more or less efficient than others in detecting 
crime, whether New York juries are more or less 
lenient than others in criminal cases, whether the 

[si 


judges are more or less severe in inflicting punish¬ 
ment, whether the pardoning authority is more or 
less frequently exercised, whether the cost of the 
police force is more or less, proportionately, than 
that of other police forces. 

Those instances could be elaborated to cover al¬ 
most everything with which Government is concerned 
—methods of legislation, child-labor, factory inspec¬ 
tion, care of the insane and defective, taxation, 
prison management, forestry, public works, civil 
service, etc. 

The fundamental cause of the present delinquency 
of Government is that there has been no comprehen¬ 
sive scientific analysis of modern Government, that 
practically everything connected with it is still in the 
field of controversy, conjecture, and surmise. 

The hazard of this situation is made doubly for¬ 
midable by the circumstance that every group of 
anti-constitutionalists has a plan to offer for the 
regeneration of the politico-social complex, while the 
Constitutionalists have nothing to offer which is less 
illusory than the renewal of the very promises which 
the world has finally been driven to regard with the 
deepest distrust. If the Constitutionalists cannot 
do better than this, nothing is more certain than that, 
sooner or later, the control of Government will be 
taken from them. 


II. 

The following paragraphs embody, in outline, a 
plan which the Constitutionalists could offer as an 
alternative to all the proposals put forward by the 
Bolshevists, the Syndicalists, and other revolutionary 
[ 6 ] 


factions. It could be operated within the Constitu¬ 
tional limits of any national or state Government, 
without violating any Constitutional principle asso¬ 
ciated with popular Government. 

Establish an International Society for the Scien¬ 
tific Study of Comparative Government, supported 
partly by membership subscriptions and partly by 
endowments. Let this Society conduct, through the 
agency of an International Research Institute, a 
continuing investigation, of the highest scientific char¬ 
acter, of every question of form and function in Gov¬ 
ernment—on the basis of a wide comparison—and 
upon the results of these investigations let it estab¬ 
lish in respect of every function of Government the 
correlations between aims, methods, costs, and re¬ 
sults. 

This Society will have to conform, in its structure 
and in its operation, to certain rigid conditions, if 
it is to acquire the authoritative standing upon which 
the whole of its usefulness would depend. The mere 
enumeration of these conditions will suffice to dis¬ 
close the elements which would differentiate the 
Society’s Research Institute from any Institution 
which has ever occupied itself with the study of Gov¬ 
ernment, and will serve to meet all objections which 
rest upon the argument that we already have too 
many Societies, and that a new Society cannot hope 
to succeed where hundreds of other Societies have 
failed. 

A. The Society must be an absolutely new Society, 
and must not be made up by amalgamating 
Societies and Institutions now in existence. The 
reason for this is that the present state of Gov¬ 
ernment is what it is despite the long-continued 

[7] 


efforts of existing Societies to improve Govern¬ 
ment. It is only a new Society which would not 
be confronted by the immediate necessity of ex¬ 
plaining its past failures. 

B. The Society would operate through a Research 
Institute. Government itself cannot perform 
effectively the work of such a Research Insti¬ 
tute; first, because its analysis of its own opera¬ 
tions could not be made scientifically objective; 
second, because Government, having the power 
to enforce its views, is under no pressure to find 
a scientific solution for its problems; third, be¬ 
cause the people could never be brought to be¬ 
lieve that its enquiries were not tainted by 
political partisanship. 

The executive authority of the Institute would 
be located in a Committee of scientists—men of 
the highest distinction in one or another of the 
analytical sciences. The Director of the Insti¬ 
tute would submit to this Committee each major 
project of investigation, so drafted that the aim 
in view and the proposed method of research 
could be examined by the Committee. No 
project above a certain magnitude would be 
undertaken until the Committee had approved 
the method to be followed. It would not be 
necessary for members of the Committee to 
have any special knowledge of the field to be 
investigated, since the logic of analytics does 
not vary with the nature of the material. This 
certification of method would relieve the In¬ 
stitute of any charge that its work was influ¬ 
enced by the money or by the importunities of 
the members of the Society. 

[ 8 ] 


C. The investigating staff would not be gathered 
together as a permanent body within the Insti¬ 
tute. Each investigation would be assigned to 
a staff of specialists drawn from different parts 
of the world, on temporary appointment. This 
arrangement would have two highly important 
results. The investigators would not develop 
an institutional psychology, of which the effect 
usually is to divide a man’s loyalty between the 
pursuit of truth and the desire to shield the 
reputation of the Institute or of one or more 
of its employees. Furthermore, as one investi¬ 
gation might be undertaken by a Dane, a Scots¬ 
man, and an Australian, and another by an 
American, a Frenchman, and a Russian, the 
work of the Institute would reflect all that was 
best in the science and culture of every nation. 

D. The work of the permanent central staff of the 
Institute would consist entirely in analyzing the 
Reports of the investigators and in preparing 
them for full or for condensed publication in 
the form of books, pamphlets, and statistical 
abstracts. 

E. The Research Institute would have nothing 
whatever to do with propaganda or with the 
advocacy of any course of action. It would 
hold itself rigorously to the single task of 
making knowledge about Government available 
to all who cared to seek it. Its sole interest 
would be that any statement bearing its imprint 
should be true, and that any opinion contained 
in its Reports should be well founded on the 
facts. It would be well to emphasize the in¬ 
difference of the Institute to everything except 

[9] 


truth by awarding annually a gold medal and 
a substantial sum of money to that person who 
should be adjudged, by some impartial body, 
to have pointed out the most serious error in 
the Institute’s work during the previous year. 

F. The finances of the Society would have to per¬ 
mit the payment of specialists’ fees not less than 
the highest fees paid by anyone anywhere. It 
is true that a certain amount of excellent work 
is done by underpaid enthusiasts in the service 
of Governments and of Universities; but this 
does not affect the rule that the best work is 
usually the best-paid work. The Institute would 
have to secure the services of the most able 
and experienced men living. 


III. 

It remains to discuss the means by which the work 
of an International Institute for Government Re¬ 
search could be made to improve the quality and to 
reduce the cost of Government, and thus to abate 
the present discontents. It is clear that if taxation 
were greatly reduced, if a great increase in efficiency 
occurred in the multifarious services which a modern 
Government is called upon to perform, if a great 
improvement were shown in the technique of 
handling all the politico-social problems by which 
the world is confronted, the activities of the extreme 
radicals would perish for lack of nourishment. 

For the successful operation of the Institute it is, 
fortunately, unnecessary to assume that a great moral 
awakening is about to illumine the world, or that 
there will have to be any sudden weakening of the 
[lO] 



selfish motives by which so many people are actuated, 
or that the stupid are to become intelligent, the idle 
industrious, the ignorant informed, by some magical 
process. The success of the Institute may be predi¬ 
cated upon a few very simple and practical consid¬ 
erations. 

In every part of the self-governing world Govern¬ 
ment is administered along the lines of party politics: 
the “ins” want to stay in, the “outs” want to get in. 
Now almost every election, under our present sys¬ 
tem, is fought out on the basis of charges and denials 
concerning inefficient, corrupt, or extravagant ad¬ 
ministration; and at the present time there exists 
practically no authoritative information, accessible 
to anybody except the most expert students, on which 
these charges can be definitely formulated or con¬ 
clusively proved. The result is that elections are 
won and lost on what is practically nothing but 
unsupported assertion. The cause of good Govern¬ 
ment is, therefore, little more than the plaything of 
competing politicians. 

But with the Research Institute founded and 
operating, an entirely new element would be intro¬ 
duced into politics. The attack upon the “ins” could 
then be made categorical and specific instead of 
assertive and oratorical. If I wanted to get the 
city administration out, because of its bad police 
administration, I could procure from the Institute a 
statement showing, in every detail, the state of police 
administration in twenty cities of a population about 
equal to that of mine. If my contentions about the 
police were sound, I could prove that they were 
sound, by producing facts and figures from a source 
of unimpeachable impartiality. If the voters turned 
[II] 



the city administration out on this issue, it would be 
turned out on the basis of fact and not of assertion. 
When my party had assumed office, the “outs” 
would, in their turn, be eager to apply the same 
method. They would prove, from material avail¬ 
able in the Reports of the Institute, that the typhoid 
epidemic, for instance, was due to our failure to 
redeem our election-promise to improve the water- 
supply, and they would prove it by showing that a 
dozen other cities, which had modernized their sys¬ 
tem of water-supply, had not had a typhoid epidemic; 
and SO on, over the whole field of administration. 

The influence of this kind of pressure—constantly 
exerted in national, state, and municipal elections— 
would soon make itself felt. It would require but 
a short time to establish in the mind of every prac¬ 
tical citizen, not of the class of professional poli¬ 
tician, a realization that his own best interest had 
been served by every application of the work of the 
Institute to the actual problems of popular Govern¬ 
ment. It would not be very long before the pro¬ 
fessional politician, whose peculiar talents can be 
marketed only whilst unsupported assertion remains 
the principal weapon of political controversy, would 
find his occupation gone. 


IV. 

Attention may be directed to certain effects which 
would be produced by the activities of an Interna¬ 
tional Institute operated by a Society for the Scien¬ 
tific Study of Comparative Government. 

Legislative and Administrative Practice. 
The Constitutions, Laws, Regulations, Administra- 
[ 12 ] 



tive Manuals and Reports, and the Statistical Rec¬ 
ords of the various governments of the world con¬ 
tain an account of every experiment undertaken in 
modern times in respect of the practical working of 
Government. The tasks assigned to Government 
are, in their general character, closely similar in 
every civilized country. The existence of a central 
depository for the whole of the experimental record, 
and the periodical issuance by such an Institution of 
Reports exhibiting the state of the world’s knowl¬ 
edge about each phase of governmental activity, 
would encourage and facilitate the scientific study 
of Government, would save all the money and energy 
which might, otherwise, be expended in the redupli¬ 
cation of effort, and would, from time to time, estab¬ 
lish standards of practice and of accomplishment for 
the information of all legislative and administrative 
officials in all countries. 

Politics. With a membership resident in every 
political division and sub-division of the world, the 
work of the Society would have the double effect of 
greatly improving the quality of the demands made 
on Government, and of greatly increasing the ability 
of legislators and of administrators to meet these 
demands. A more intelligent understanding on the 
part of the voter of what Government can do for 
him, and a more intelligent understanding on the 
part of officials of how Government can do it, would 
unite to reduce the cost and to increase the efficiency 
of the public service. 

Education. At the present time the teaching of 
Government, except in its most advanced stage, is 
generally confined to its structural elements. What 
we teach is, in fact, no more than Government’s own 

[13] 


description of itself, in constitutions, laws, and regu¬ 
lations. Little is done to work back from observed 
conditions along the chain of causation by which 
these conditions have been produced. 

For this state of affairs the teacher is not to blame. 
There is no analyzed material available which makes 
it possible for him to start his pupils from the ob¬ 
servation of a badly paved street in front of the 
school-house and—on the basis of a comparison with 
other streets in front of other school-houses in other 
towns and in other countries—to trace for them the 
vital connection between their muddy shoes and every 
detail of the theory and practice of Government from 
the marking of a ballot up to the appointment of a 
Supreme Court Judge. 

The work of the Institute would make available 
an abundance of analyzed material upon which there 
could be founded a new science of the teaching of 
Government—a science which would change our 
present system from a dull, formal, and repellant 
discipline into a constructive and stimulating exer¬ 
cise of the most flexible and responsive qualities of 
the mind and character of youth. The effect would 
be to develop gradually a body of voters thoroughly 
familiar with the idea, now utterly strange to politics, 
that the results of ignorance, of stupidity, and of 
indifference are more costly, more uncomfortable, 
more dangerous, more difficult to avert, and more 
difficult to repair in the field of Government than 
they are in any other field of human activity. 

International Relations. The Society and 
the Institute would not represent the organization 
of power, but the organization of knowledge. Every 
organization of power is, ultimately, an organized 

[14] 


threat against dissent from its decisions. It is this 
circumstance which causes everyone to fear and to 
distrust organized power. 

Neither the Society nor the Institute would seek 
to exercise power of any kind. Membership in the 
Society would be voluntarily assumed and could be 
relinquished at the pleasure of the member. The 
Institute would not tell anybody what he ought to 
do; it would enable everybody to know what had 
been done and what consequences had followed 
various kinds of action. In such a situation there 
would lie the possibility of developing a new type 
of international relationship. 

The members of the Society in all parts of the 
world would be interested in a common enterprise 
in which, since its sole object would be the discovery 
and dissemination of truth, and of truth the most 
useful and salutory, there could arise no conflict of 
interest and no rivalry except that of emulation. 

Engaged in an undertaking whose success would 
minister equally to the welfare of all peoples, and 
could not militate against the welfare of any, the 
membership of the Society might well create a living 
bond of unity between the intelligent and well-dis¬ 
posed of every nation. 

Radicalism. All extremist organizations reflect 
serious discontent with existing conditions. The 
nature of this discontent ranges between an emo¬ 
tional resentment, wholly inaccessible to reason, and 
a justified dissatisfaction which has become hopeless 
of reform except through profound changes in the 
principles upon which Constitutional Government 
rests and in the instrumentalities through which it 
operates. This gives us the anarchist at one end of 
[IS] 


the line and the socialist at the other, separated by 
lines of gradation which cannot be accurately placed. 

The Society for the Scientific Study of Com¬ 
parative Government could, of course, offer nothing 
which would be attractive to the anarchist; but with 
the Socialists, and especially with their right wing, 
the case would be different. Thousands of serious 
and patriotic citizens have joined the Socialist or¬ 
ganization for no other reason than that the Con¬ 
stitutionalists have failed to present to them any 
plan upon which a reasonable hope could be founded 
that Constitutional Government can be made the 
efficient agent of the modern social purpose. 

The idea of an International Research Institute, 
devoted to the scientific study of Comparative Gov¬ 
ernment, should make a strong appeal to all Socialists 
who are not moved more by a craving for revolution, 
as such, than by a sincere desire to improve the lot 
of humanity by whatever process might be shown, 
through comprehensive analytical investigation, to 
be best suited to achieve that object. 

Alleyne Ireland. 

16 Gramercy Park, 

New York City. 


[i6] 




